September 2013

There’s so many design blogs and good content to read on the web it can be a tough task to read every great blog post.Therefore we have decided to highlight the best design tutorial and web/design article from the online blogging community. There’s some really great articles certainly worth your time. Please leave your thoughts in the comments section on what’s been your favourite blog post, which you have read through some point in September.

These days, making your website responsive is a MUST! With so many mobile devices out there, you’ll be missing a lot of visitors if you won’t modify your website and make it responsive too. If you are a beginner web designer or just want to improve your skills, here are 20 really helpful responsive web design tutorials to get you started.

Halloween is near and people already started to make the preparations. Blogs and websites are filled with Halloween graphics like wallpapers, icons, templates and more! If you’re a designer and you want to create your own unique, scary Halloween work, here are 20 creepy Halloween Photoshop tutorials, which we hope that will be useful for you.

In this tutorials collection, you’ll find 20 absolutely amazing Photoshop tutorials which will teach you how to create stunning photo manipulations and effects! These tutorials will teach you new techniques and skills, essential for creating amazing photo manipulations. You can even create Photoshop Actions from these tutorials and edit your work a lot faster.

Learn from the experts how to create these awesome effects. Which one of these amazing Photoshop tutorials will you try first?

Photoshop is the best application on the market for designing and editing photos, but comes with a hefty price tag if you’re starting out in the industry or if you’re an aspiring photographer, designer etc. Look no further this is a great compilation of free Photoshop alternatives, for you to create free web graphics and enhancing photos.

The compilation is the best free web based and open source applications. We have tried to include a mixture of both mac and windows based applications and even thrown in a few applications which are compatible with Linux.

Improving your skill as a designer is hard. It takes talent, hard work and good instruction.

We’re pretty sure you already have the talent and are prepared to put in the work, so to celebrate the upcoming launch of our new site Design Cuts (which will help you in a BIG way) we’ve put together a series of design training from some of the worlds top creatives.

This training series is only available for 10 days, and features in depth tutorials and awesome freebies, provided by the top designers in the industry.

The first session is from Chris Spooner over at SpoonGraphics. Chris has put together a pack of awesome free textures, which he’ll show you how to use to create a beautiful vintage text effect.

I love tutorials that go beyond the basics and teach some really innovative techniques. This tutorial is a perfect example of that. I’ve been using Photoshop for over a decade, and our resident author Dek Wid taught me a couple of really handy tricks in this lesson.

The beauty of this tutorial is that the various source images we’re working with aren’t similar at all, but through some creativity and outside-the-box thinking you’ll learn how to turn a daytime scene into night, and rework a tractor/plastic toy into a believable sci-fi vehicle.

Not only will you learn some fantastic ways to blend your images effectively, but you’ll be creating an awesome sci-fi outcome. Time to get creatively geeky and create an outcome that you can wow your friends with.

What You’ll Be Creating:

Here’s a look at the outcome you’ll be able to produce by the end of this lesson:

Do you know the basic tools in Photoshop, but feel that your work still looks average?

Do you aspire to create work like the design masters you look up to?

Do you want to take your work from average to awesome, but don’t know how?

These issues are far too common, and the annoying thing is that most designers feel that world-class work is out of their reach.

The truth is, you already have all the tools you need to create incredible work. What’s lacking is creative direction, and that’s exactly what I give you in our first ever video course, available at FanExtra.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking with our readers, sending out surveys and planning which course would help you the most. You answered in your hundreds, and there was an overwhelming demand for this specific course.

Congratulations to TrueThemes, the latest team to reach Power Elite status by selling an incredible one million dollars worth of items. Since April 2009 they have amassed over 34,000 sales and 1,194 followers while traveling the world, working in coffee shops, and focussing on quality rather than quantity. Well done!

Icon design is nothing new. But with companies and designers always looking for a way to distinguish themselves, custom icon design has been getting more & more popular. Being an icon designer can even be a full time job now. With the ever growing mobile/apps and icons becoming more and more creative. So what makes a good custom icon design? In this tutorial, I am going to walk you through the steps how to create an icon for a new site or application.